The 12.30 from Croydon (38 page)

The first thing was to obtain official permission, and with this in view Byng had seen Sir Mortimer Ellison, Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard. Sir Mortimer had agreed to the proposal, subject to the right of revision of all proofs. Then Lucas and French had to be approached, and when it was made clear that the successes of these officers would be given under their own names, opposition to his scheme faded away. Quilter, asked for his help, had become interested and had taken advantage of a visit of himself and Lucas to Town to invite the party to dine at his hotel. Heppenstall, also interested, begged to be included in the invitation.

The great moment had now come. Dinner was over. It had been a good dinner with good wine, and the essential guests were feeling that the world was not indeed so bad a place and that if people wanted information about things it should be given them. The private room was comfortable. The chairs were easy and the fire bright. Whisky had been set out, with port for those who liked it, and Quilter produced a box of fine Corona-Coronas. In fact, he was doing all in his power to help Byng. Perhaps not entirely without reason.

‘Well,’ said Quilter tactfully to Lucas and French, as he made sure that everyone was comfortable and had drinks and smokes, ‘you gentlemen were too much for us at Cold Pickerby. Never mind, we’ll turn the tables on you next time. I confess I’ll be very much interested in what you tell us, for to me it seems an absolute miracle how you found out what you did. Even now I can’t see what you had to go on. What do you say, Heppenstall?’

The big man nodded solemnly. ‘It was a good piece of work,’ he declared, evidently anxious to give Byng a leg up; ‘just as good as ever I’ve heard of. I congratulate you, superintendent, on your good sense in calling in the Yard before it was too late and in helping French as you must have helped him, and with that you must let me connect Inspector Appleby’s name. And I congratulate Inspector French for rising to the occasion in the way he evidently did. Yes, it was a good piece of work, and I for one am very anxious to hear just how it was done.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Byng, proceeding with the mystic operation of leaving no stone unturned; ‘and there is something that I may perhaps mention at this point.’ He grinned at French and looked round mysteriously at the others. ‘It’s no longer a secret, but it is possible that all of us here may not have heard it. You spoke, Heppenstall, of Inspector French. You won’t be able to a month hence. Then, we’ll all be glad to know, you’ll have to speak of Chief-Inspector French!’

‘Bravo!’ cried Quilter. ‘I’m delighted to hear it. Fill up, gentlemen. I give you the toast of Chief-Inspector French, and may he live long to enjoy his well-earned promotion!’

French was evidently delighted though somewhat embarrassed. He explained that in three weeks Chief-Inspector Mitchell was retiring and that he was getting his job. He thanked them all very much for their kind words. Everyone clapped. All was peace and amity and the atmosphere just what Byng wanted.

‘You have this book stunt on, Mr Byng?’ said Lucas after a pause. ‘What do you want us to do?’

Byng made a gesture as if abandoning frivolity and getting down to brass tacks.

‘I want you, if you will, to tell me how you did the trick. First, I would like to ask you, superintendent, what made you suspicious and why you decided to call in the Yard, and then I would like to ask French how the case struck him on arrival and just what you all did right from that point up to the trial.’

‘Well,’ Lucas returned, ‘I’m a bit surprised that such matters should be made public. However, the chief constable has agreed and I have personally no objection to telling you anything I can. I understand you’ve got authority from Sir Mortimer, French?’

‘Yes, he’s quite agreeable.’

‘It’s this new stunt of popularizing the detective service by letting the public know what it can do,’ said Heppenstall; ‘at least, I understand so. It’s the answer to that silly criticism of our police forces which has obtained for so long. The authorities are at last waking up to the fact that if the public only knew what is done, they would criticize no more.’

‘Shouldn’t have given the authorities credit for so much sense,’ declared Lucas, which showed how the atmosphere of the room had relaxed.

‘Nor I,’ Heppenstall agreed. ‘Well, Byng, pleasant as all this is, we can’t sit here for more than a month or two. Suppose you get going.’

Byng opened his notebook. He was an expert shorthand writer. ‘Perhaps, superintendent, you would go ahead then and tell us why you got suspicious and why you called in the Yard?’

Lucas made the small preparations to be expected under the circumstances. He drew his cigar up to a bright red, took a sip of whisky, cleared his throat and settled himself once more comfortably in his chair. Then he began.

‘It’s very easy to tell you that. In the first place here was the death of a wealthy man for which the French doctor who was called in could find no natural cause. Apart from his suggestion and the suggestion of the French police, it was obvious that a post-mortem was required. The post-mortem was held, and that gave us the fact that poison had been administered, and the equally obvious question then arose as to whether the death was due to accident, suicide, or murder.

‘Now on the face of it, accident seemed unlikely. The same lunch had been served to something like thirty persons and none of the rest had complained of illness. Therefore the affair had a personal connexion with the deceased, not shared by the other passengers. Then potassium cyanide is a more or less rare poison, not in common use and comparatively difficult to obtain. It could only have been brought to the plane in a deliberate way. On a balance then, the affair looked like either suicide or murder, though admittedly this was not proven.

‘Turning to suicide, it was obvious that this theory had three objections. Of these two were slight and one was serious. Of the slight ones, the first was that the deceased had no real motive for suicide. He was depressed, but no one suggested his depression was bad enough to lead to suicide. On the contrary, he had a motive for living; he was particularly anxious to see his daughter. He had undertaken a tiresome journey for the purpose, and this was almost over, so that it was unlikely he would not at least complete it. Then secondly, there was nothing in the deceased’s manner to suggest suicide; neither depression nor excitement nor sense of strain, some one of which would surely have shown if he had contemplated anything so drastic.

‘But the third objection was the really serious one. If the deceased had brought that poison, he must have brought it in something, some box or bottle. No such receptacle was found. It looked like murder.’

‘What about the coroner’s suggestion that the receptacle might have been lost when the body was being lifted from the plane?’ asked Quilter.

The super shrugged: ‘Possible of course,’ he admitted, ‘but the French police were on the job, and I ask you, is it likely? They’re pretty good, those French fellows.’

‘I expect you’re right, super.’

‘At the same time,’ Lucas went on, ‘I got Appleby to have a look over The Moat. Among other things he told me that the old man had been an expert photographer, and I had a sort of idea that potassium cyanide was used in photography, so I had that gone into. Mr Grant, the analyst, confirmed that the stuff was used, we made a search, and as you know, there was potassium cyanide there.’

‘That was what the coroner went on at the inquest,’ said Byng.

‘Yes,’ Lucas rejoined, ‘but between you and me, the coroner—’ He winked very slowly; an admirably non-committal expression of disparagement. ‘Well, there was nothing in it, but we thought the coroner’s views would help us by lulling the murderer to sleep, so we didn’t put him wise to his mistake.’

‘Now, superintendent, you’re going too quickly for me,’ Byng protested. ‘I don’t follow all that. Will you make it clearer. Words of one syllable, please, for a little one.’

‘You couldn’t have followed it, because I didn’t tell you what Appleby found. There was thick dust all over that bottle of poison and there were no finger-prints on it. It hadn’t been touched for long enough.’

‘Good,’ exclaimed Byng. ‘That settles that. But how did you get out of telling the coroner?’

‘He didn’t ask. One would have thought that the first question would be, “Were there finger-prints on this bottle?” But he didn’t ask it. If it hadn’t been such a useful mistake we’d have told him, but nothing better for us could have happened. We could then carry on our inquiries with the murderer off his guard.’

‘That’s very clear. Then right at the beginning of the inquiry you knew that murder had been committed?’

‘We thought so. We weren’t absolutely sure, because though unlikely, it was still
possible
that the deceased had some solid cyanide and that the paper he’d had it in had got lost. However, we knew enough to know we must go further. Then when the will was read we thought we had got the motive.’

‘Right. How did you find out its terms?’

‘From the legatees. This was before the adjourned inquest, you understand, and we were supposed to be still making inquiries for that. None of the legatees dared to put us off, as this would have looked fishy on the publication of the will.’

Byng nodded without speaking and Superintendent Lucas after a slight pause went on.

‘I confess that at this time we hadn’t thought of the pills as a vehicle for the poison, and therefore our possible suspects were Peter Morley and John Weatherup only. I was personally inclined to bank on Morley, believing he had leant forward over the deceased’s shoulder, attracted Weatherup’s attention elsewhere, and dropped the poison into the food. But of course there was no proof. Then we thought of the pills and we saw that they enlarged the scope of the affair to include almost anybody.

‘Things had reached this stage when the question of calling in the Yard arose. That was not settled on the merits of this case. It was settled by the fact that we were short-handed. Appleby was busy on those Chislefield burglaries, and I had no one else I should have cared to trust with it. So we got French down, and I’m glad we did. He has pulled off this case, while Appleby pulled off the burglary one. Hornby and Simmington, who broke into that house at Chislefield, were sentenced at the same assizes.’

‘That’s really very interesting, superintendent,’ Quilter declared. ‘That’s to say that you asked French to come in to investigate a case which you believed was murder, though the public thought it suicide? That statement should be clear enough for you, Byng?’

‘Exactly what I wanted,’ Byng played up. ‘Now,’ he looked at French, ‘if you, inspector, will continue on the same lines, I’ll be able to work up a fine story.’

French having in his turn carried out the preliminaries of speech, took up his parable.

‘The first thing I did when I got down here was to check everything I had been told.’ He grinned across at Lucas. ‘You see, Mr Byng, I didn’t know the super or Appleby then. So I took nothing they said for granted, but checked it all over for myself.’

‘Naturally,’ Byng murmured. ‘Knowing the police, I should have done the same, eh, super?’

‘Isn’t that life?’ Lucas appealed to the heavens. ‘Here we supply him with his whole stock-in-trade; make his job possible, in fact; and that’s what we get for it! Go on, French. You checked your information?’

‘I checked it.’ French grinned again. ‘I was started on what was probably a case of murder, and the first thing I had to do was to make sure of whether it was or not.

‘I thought the best way was to assume murder, and see where it led, and I began by considering not who had done it, but how it had been done.

‘Now, so far as I could see, there were only three possibilities; either Weatherup had slipped the poison into the old man’s food, or Morley had done it, or it had been contained in a pill.

‘It was obvious that to drop the poison into the food would have been dangerous. It might easily have been seen, if not by some third person, then by the deceased himself. On the other hand, if a poisoned pill could have been introduced into the bottle, the murderer would have considered himself absolutely safe. The balance of probability – I put it no higher than that – the balance of probability seemed to me therefore in favour of the pill.

‘There was another point. I knew that potassium cyanide was a very rapid-acting poison, and I looked it up in my “Taylor”. I found that it was quicker even than I had supposed. Complete insensibility had always occurred within minutes, and often within seconds. This suggested that the poison had been taken at the end of the meal, which again pointed to the pill.’

‘Ingenious,’ Heppenstall commented.

‘Next,’ went on French, ‘I went to see the analyst. He told me some rather interesting facts.

‘First of all he agreed that a pill was a suitable vehicle for the poison. Further, the amount of poison found in the body could just have been contained in a pill. Moreover, this amount would have been about sufficient to kill a normal man, and more than enough in the case of a man with a weak heart. So that was all right so far.

‘But there was a stronger point still. Potassium cyanide, he reminded me, is normally a solid. A pill would therefore be an absolutely ideal way of administering it, whereas in ordinary food it would probably have been found like a bone or a pebble and ejected from the mouth.’

‘Good,’ exclaimed Byng. ‘I hadn’t thought of that point.’

‘I thought the argument was fairly convincing. I could scarcely see Morley or Weatherup in that public place pouring liquid out of a bottle on to the old gentleman’s food. If they didn’t, a solid was probably used, and if they used a solid they would scarcely put it in ordinary food, hence probably the pill. This was not of course conclusive, because there was the possibility of powdering the solid. But the pill seemed the easiest way.

‘Then another thing struck me. The use of the pill would enable the murderer to establish what he would consider an invincible alibi. If the poisoned pill could be inserted in the bottle, the murderer could be miles away when the death of the victim took place.’